Items to Share: 12 July 2015

Education Focus

• 'Banning the bullet’ in student presentations | The Higher Education Academy Official Site 'Students can often take the easy way when generating a presentation, creating lists of bullet points from a source text, without thinking about the effectiveness (or not) of such approaches or how close they may be to plagiarism of the source. As educators who are seeking to develop students transferable skills we need to facilitate the acquisition of more imaginative approaches to oral presentations by students.' “Reconstructing” the source information to create something more visual may itself facilitate learning.'

• Are Oxbridge tutorials still the best way to teach students how to think? [theconversation.com]

• My vote for the top 10 tools in learning 2015 [teachinginhighered.com] Digital, of course.

• Sucking the life out of the academy | Education | spiked 'The new universities minister wants more meddling and micromanagement.'

• Lesson Study – the best type of CPD you can do in school! | mhorley 'Last week, I joined two colleagues to carry out a Lesson Study looking at Decimal Place Value with Year 7. I[...] this is just a quick reflection on the process.

• Seven rules the Teaching Excellence Framework should follow | Higher Education Network | The Guardian 'A new way to measure teaching quality in universities could soon be on the cards. Here’s how to get it off to a good start'

Other Business

• The powers that be are taking the pop out of Bubble Wrap because they hate us [mashable.com]

• The American Scholar: It Takes a Laboratory - Sam Kean On the growth of large teams of experimenters in science.

• Small talk dies in agonies | joe moran's words 'I do not regard small talk as a vice. I think of it as a vital life skill, but in my case acquiring it seems to be the work of a lifetime.'